1.13.2022
The 33 Project
Hello friends. Happy Thursday. I just saw a shirtless man in shorts walking outside. He leaped over melting snow to cross the street. It’s 36 degrees in New York City. Thrilling.
On to this week’s recs.
1/ “We are living in a serious attention crisis – one with huge implications for how we live.“ This first person take on attention in the modern age was pretty interesting.
I came to believe we need to respond to this incessant invasion of our attention at two levels. The first is individual. There are all sorts of changes we can make at a personal level that will protect our focus. I would say that by doing most of them, I have boosted my focus by about 20%. But we have to level with people. Those changes will only take you so far. At the moment it’s as though we are all having itching powder poured over us all day, and the people pouring the powder are saying: “You might want to learn to meditate. Then you wouldn’t scratch so much.” Meditation is a useful tool – but we actually need to stop the people who are pouring itching powder on us. We need to band together to take on the forces stealing our attention and take it back.
Another argument against people with power and money. Would love to better understand how we “band together” but also just kind of want to get through today, too, ya know? Shrug.
2/ I found Matt Yglesias’s take on Don’t Look Up to be really sharp.
Having enjoyed the film myself, I was initially surprised at some of the media backlash and complaints. I, like Yglesias, think they missed the point. I agree about punching up vs. down (see pull quotes below) but considering the bigger picture is key here.
The trouble, as always, is a cohort of older, less-educated, less-urbanized voters who have more conservative views across the board, including greater hostility to government spending and regulation and much greater distrust of both academic experts and mainstream media.
From the standpoint of constructing a satirical film, doing biting commentary about vapidity among shallow media celebrities (a real thing!) is much better than punching down at working-class senior citizens. But factually speaking, the views of working-class senior citizens are the reason climate hawks struggle to control the political pivot points in American politics, not the views of elite journalists.
And, in my opinion, his true point on climate change is the most resonant.
The fundamental problem of climate change is that it involves asking people to make changes now for the sake of preventing harms that occur largely in the future to people living in other countries. It’s a genuine problem from hell, and it’s not actually solved by understanding the science or believing the factual information.
3/ This seems troubling. I wish we could have better sex education.
Between 2009 and 2018, the proportion of adolescents reporting no sexual activity, either alone or with partners, rose from 28.8 percent to 44.2 percent among young men and from 49.5 percent in 2009 to 74 percent among young women.
That’s all for this week! Thank you for reading and I’ll be on the lookout for some more positive content next week 🤣. Have a great day.